The formation of airline alliances has been a distinctive feature of the airline business at the threshold of the new millennium. This is due to the framework of Bilateral Air Transport Agreements, which condition the grant of traffic rights to substantial ownership and effective control being vested in nationals of one of the contracting parties. Further regulatory aspects pertaining to airline alliances include competition law review, traffic rights, and slot allocation. / This thesis seeks to elucidate how Star had to adapt its strategic choices to this framework. The outcome will be that in particular the lack of regulatory convergence in competition law matters constitutes a hindrance to a global alliance such as Star. The issue of ownership and control might represent a further obstacle to an alliance intending to rely on mergers or major share holding, an ambition that Star has not nourished so far. Open Skies agreements in force between the U.S., Canada, and several member states of the European Union give alliances full commercial opportunities, unhindered by restrictive capacity or approval of fares provisions. The principles as regards slot allocation, on the other hand, have enabled alliances to build up their hubs as fortresses. / The issues of competition law, and ownership and control illustrate that it has become increasingly insufficient to rely on a merely bilateral approach to global problems. Eventually, satisfactory solutions may only be achieved on a multilateral level. The onus thus is on aviation regulators to come up with a more suitable framework for aviation in the next century. / Multilateralism, however, might turn out to herald the end to the alliance phenomenon. Once the bilateral strait jacket put aside, the aviation industry will consolidate like any other industry: by mergers, that is.

Recently, air transportation has been increasing considerably. If that trend continues, there could be a major accident once a week by the year 2010. European States first joined their aviation policies for geographical and economical reasons. To that end, following the American deregulation, they started liberalizing their air transport. Today, they also work on the safety aspects of this activity. Together with the European Community and the DGCA's, three organisations have a relevant function in the regulation of safety: they help States to coordinate new preventive actions. Furthermore, in order to unify the measures that are currently implemented, a discussion on a single European aviation safety authority has been raised in the last few years. / In the course of this thesis, the above-mentioned topics will be studied, whereby a preliminary chapter will focus on the origin of the unification of European air transport and the liberalization aspects, and the three following chapters will review the institutional and legal aspects of the safety of European air transport.

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The airline industry has undergone an unprecedented crisis in the aftermath of the events of September 11th, 2001 in the United States. At that time, the U.S. federal government rapidly moved to create and implement an important rescue package to ensure the sustainability of the U.S. airlines. Contrarily, the European Commission decided to keep the existing legislations and policies regarding state aid, allowing limited support from the Member States to their national carriers. For the Commission, the U.S. state-involvement in the air industry, as well as similar developments in other countries, was bound to create distortions of competition. This situation led the EU to submit a proposal to the Council and the European Parliament for a Regulation with aims to protect the Community airlines from the unfair pricing practices of state-aided non-Community air carriers. The text, modeled after the legislation applicable in the field of trade of goods, would fill a "legal void" and be a new efficient legislative tool for the Commission. Questions did arise, however, about its political legitimacy as well as its legal basis.

The Law on the State Enterprise was the most radical reform effort in the history of the Soviet centrally-planned system; it was also contradictory in its formulation, adopted in isolation and a complete failure in implementation. Previous economic reform attempts had also failed, but had been followed by retreat. This time, however, it was not. This thesis analyses the policy and the policy process of the enterprise law as expectations of the potential of reform shifted to convictions that central planning was unreformable. This case-study uses a number of traditional and revisionist theories about the policy process to analyse policy-making in the conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity of perestroika. The chronic problems of the Soviet economy led to the generation of reformist alternatives which, with the close of the Brezhnev era, began to emerge in programmatic form. This alternative envisaged a simultaneous delegation of administrative decision-making authority to the level of the state enterprise and a redefinition of central powers. Enterprises were to finance their own activities, compile their own plans, engage in direct wholesale trading, and be governed by the labour collective in an economic environment manipulated by the centre through 'economic levers'. Reformist domination of the policy agenda was constrained by limited penetration of the decision-making structures. Mutually indifferent policy-subsystems located within the ministerial and planning agencies held jurisdiction over the activities of pre-reform state enterprises; dominated the drafting of specific legislation; and set adverse initial conditions of reform implementation. Unsuccessful implementation of reform both at the level of the state enterprise and that of administrative structures discredited the radical ideas on economic reform which had been gestating for thirty years. Failure both of the concrete policy and of the policy process contributed to the radicalisation of political and economic reform, while creating many new problems along the way.

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Our intended topic is a general discussion of the basic elements of liability related to airline accidents to which fully automated cockpits have constituted an associated contributory factor. In addition we addressed the liability of air carriers arising from injuries or death caused to passengers traveling on international flights. For this purpose, we reviewed the Warsaw System and the different international instruments that constitute it. We also reviewed principles of common law applicable to aircraft manufacturers and the "Free Flight" as an example of the growing automation environment, which is a general benefit to commercial aviation but also a likely contributory cause for accidents in particular cases. In the last part we briefly discuss a personal view regarding the interplay between manufacturers and airlines under the 1999 Montreal Convention, which is an international treaty unifying the desegregated Warsaw System into one single instrument that is expected to enter into force in a few years.

The 'Open Skies' policy launched by the United States in 1992 gave birth to new bilateral agreements between them and most Member States of the European Union, as the latter were adopting a single aviation market. Nevertheless, the nationality clause the agreements included conflicted with the Community principle of freedom of establishment. / On November 5, 2002, the European Court of Justice therefore ruled there was indeed violation. However, the true question raised by the agreements focused less on such violation, which was anterior to those agreements, than on their fragmentation and the inequality they created in the Europe/United States aviation relations. / Indeed, the issue to be stressed in the judgments is linked to the building of the external competence of the Union with regards to aviation. While the Court refused to grant total competence to the Community, it made that of the Member States impracticable, leading to a global mandate for the Commission. / Although the orientations of the agreements to be concluded are foreseeable, the role the European Union will play in a potential multilateral negotiation remains to be defined.